Georgian Dream's repeated invocation of Georgia's strategic transit importance to fend off Western criticism is built on a temporary advantage tied to Russia's war in Ukraine that could evaporate once the conflict ends, Kornely Kakachia, director of the Tbilisi-based Georgian Institute of Politics, told IntelliNews in an interview.

The warning comes as the ruling party increasingly leans on Georgia's role in the Middle Corridor to justify defying Western pressure over democratic backsliding, even as a separate new academic paper argues that a parallel, Iran-driven transit boom is being undercut by exactly the political behaviour Kakachia describes.

"They overexaggerate it," Kakachia said of the government's reliance on the Middle Corridor, the trade route linking China and Central Asia to Europe via the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus and the Black Sea. He argued that the corridor's current importance stems largely from Western sanctions on Russia and the rerouting of trade away from the Northern Corridor options through Russian territory, rather than from any durable structural advantage.

"Economically speaking, and also logistically speaking, the Middle Corridor cannot compete with the Northern Corridor," he said, predicting that once the war in Ukraine ends, "I'm not sure that the Middle Corridor still will be kind of important." Georgia, he said, is "benefitting because of the war" in ways that will not last, and the government should not mistake a wartime windfall for a permanent shift in its strategic standing.

He likened the current strategy to the unfulfilled promises once attached to transit projects from the era of TRACECA (Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia) in the 1990s, when Georgia was central to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline and rail corridor. "That was also a political project. It was not an economically driven project, because economically it should go through Armenia," he said, warning against repeating that pattern of overreliance: "You cannot just put everything on this corridor."

Kakachia's comments come as he and Teona Lavrelashvili, a political scientist at Sciences Po Strasbourg, publish a separate paper through the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies. The paper argues that the war between Israel and Iran, which began with US and Israeli strikes at the end of February, has reshaped the South Caucasus's strategic position in starkly uneven ways.

It notes that overflight traffic through Georgian and South Caucasus airspace has surged from roughly 642 to nearly 2,000 daily flights since Iranian airspace closed in late February, while the ports of Poti and Batumi have reached capacity as Middle Corridor cargo flows intensify.

Yet the paper argues this growing strategic value has been undercut by Georgian Dream's domestic trajectory. It cites the 2024 Foreign Agents Law, the contested October 2024 elections, and the government's ambiguous posture toward Iran, including lighting Tbilisi's Mtatsminda Tower in the colours of the Islamic Republic to mark the Iranian revolution's anniversary in February, and Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze's attendance at the funeral of former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi in May 2024.

Speaking to IntelliNews, Kakachia argued that Georgia's value to Western partners has historically rested less on geography than on its image as an aspiring democracy, and that this is now being squandered. "Georgia was the forepost of Western interest in the Caucasus, and Georgia was always one of the staunchest supporters of the EU and United States," he said.

Western support over the past three decades, he argued, was never primarily about geography or sympathy for individual Georgian leaders. It was because Tbilisi presented itself as "a permanent laboratory of reforms in democracy."

That dynamic, he said, is now reversing. "If Georgia loses this image of the democratic-minded country, then Georgia just becomes another post-Soviet country," he said. "You can still have the embassy, everything, but it will be pretty much the same as what kind of relations the EU has with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan."

He attributed the shift to the ruling party's prioritisation of its own survival over the country's long-term interests. "I think they're trying to sell oligarchs' personal interest as the national interest of Georgia. The oligarchs' interest and Georgia's national interest are two different things."

He said Georgian Dream's diplomatic diversification, including a free trade agreement with China, visa-free arrangements, and intensified outreach to Central Asian states, Turkey and the Gulf, is designed to signal to Washington and Brussels that Tbilisi has alternatives. But he called it "a false multi-vector foreign policy."

Genuine multi-vector diplomacy, he argued, requires maintaining good relations with all sides simultaneously, not the wholesale alienation of one bloc in favour of another. "What happens is that Georgia has a strategic link now with China, but it has absolutely alienated its own strategic partner, including the European Union and United States," he said.

Kakachia described an internal EU split over how to handle Georgia. One camp, he said, argues geography requires continued technical engagement regardless of democratic backsliding. The other insists Brussels cannot treat a nominal EU candidate the same way it treats non-aspirant states like Azerbaijan. "There's still this fighting between these two groups, you can call them pragmatists or whatever you want," he said.

He noted that Georgian Dream frequently points to the EU's transactional relationship with Azerbaijan to argue it is being held to a double standard, a comparison he rejected. "Azerbaijan was never ever wanting to become a member of the European Union. It was never a democratic state. Public opinion doesn't support EU integration there, and Georgia is different. Public opinion here supports integration, plus you have this tradition of democracy at least, and it's formally still a candidate country."

That ambiguity within the EU's own ranks, he said, ultimately benefits Georgian Dream, allowing it to claim it faces no meaningful external pressure and retains alternative strategic options should the West press too hard.

The Martens Centre paper urges the EU to abandon its fragmented, country-by-country approach to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Instead, it calls for a "South Caucasus Strategic Resilience Agenda" combining energy security, infrastructure protection, conflict prevention and conditional connectivity investment.

Among its recommendations: reinforcing the EU's civilian monitoring missions in Armenia and Georgia, conducting joint vulnerability assessments of pipelines, ports, railways and digital cables exposed to Iranian-linked sabotage risk, and elevating the Middle Corridor to a flagship of the EU's Global Gateway connectivity strategy while avoiding overdependence on any single regional actor.

For Georgia specifically, the paper argues new infrastructure investment should be tied to "measurable progress on the rule of law, media freedom, civil society space and foreign-policy alignment." It suggests Brussels consider redirecting flexible funding toward municipalities, universities and civil society rather than the central government where democratic standards continue to deteriorate.

Asked whether the US-backed "Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity", or TRIPP, linked to Armenia-Azerbaijan normalisation, could further erode Georgia's position, Kakachia said the risk was real but not inevitable. "If everything goes well, and if Georgia will not change, and Georgia will be excluded from the project, and this becomes again a geopolitical project which excludes Georgia, then yes," he said.

He added that geography still makes it difficult to construct alternative routes entirely bypassing Georgian territory, and noted that both the EU and US have already signalled caution to Tbilisi on this front.